Hi Everyone,
I passed the CAPM exam above target last week, and I thought I'd share some personal advice for others on their road to achieving their CAPM.
1. Don't take too long
I made the mistake of booking my exam far out thinking that it would give me much more time to prepare. In theory, that works. However, I personally need the urgency of an upcoming exam in order to really grind and focus on studying. This may just be a personal trait of mine and not apply to everyone, but having the additional time led more to me procrastinating than anything else.
2. Read the PMBOK at least once
There's a lot of differing opinions on whether the PMBOK should be read cover to cover. I personally think that doing so helped me tremendously, especially for the CAPM. Given that you're being tested on knowledge directly from the PMBOK, having the wording and explanations directly from the source is very helpful. Also, it's not such a bad read. The information is spread out and I found a chapter generally quick to read. There's also a lot of repetition that you can read at a glance while going through the ITTO's for the 49 processes.
3. Use the CAPM Exam Content Outline
It will help pinpoint specific areas of study and where you should focus your efforts.
4. Know your ITTO's (kind of)
So this was probably my biggest area of uncertainty leading up to the exam. Should I attempt to memorize all the ITTO's or not? I decided on a strategy of knowing the distinct ITTO's for each process very well, and having a good general idea of those that are used over and over. As an example - you should know that the Activity List & Attributes are an output of the Define Activities process, and that decomposition and rolling wave planning are tools and techniques. Outside of that, you can probably guess that the PM Plan is an input, etc.
I found that the ITTO questions on the exam tend to focus of knowing critical knowledge like that, and that you could quickly eliminate wrong answers where they would, for example, include the activity list as a tool & technique rather than the output, etc.
5. Do the practice questions on the Prepcast
These questions, in my opinion, were much harder than the actual exam questions. If you can consistently score well here, you should have no problem on the actual exam.
Cheers!
Jamie
